GEORGIA: For six weeks in 1864, 10,000
Union prisoners of
war called Camp
Lawton home.
Hastily abandoned
as Sherman's army
approached, the camp
was lost to history
until archaeologists
rediscovered the site
last year. Now they
have unearthed some
personal artifacts
that are helping
reconstruct life in the
camp, including a
ring with the insignia
of the Union Army's
3rd Corps, a grocery
token from a store
in Michigan, and a
suspender buckle
from Massachusetts. (Courtesy Amanda L. Morrow, Georgia Southern University)

NEW JERSEY: Sometimes
an artifact isn't a pot or
a skull, but a woman
singing "Twinkle, Twinkle,
Little Star" to a child.
Scientists recovered the
unidentified voice from
a tin phonograph record
that would have been part
of a 123-year-old talking
doll. Because the record,
made by Thomas Edison,
was bent, it was optically
scanned to make a digital
model of the recorded
surface. Edison's talking
dolls, an early attempt
to commercialize his
phonograph, never found a market. (Courtesy National Park Service)

MEXICO: The Central American river
turtle really gets around—but not
without some help. A genetic study
of the critically endangered reptile
surprised biologists, who were expecting
to find a different lineage in each river
basin. Instead, they found that seemingly
separate populations had been mixing.
The best explanation is that people have
been transporting and trading the turtles
for ages—up to 3,000 years. Ancient
remains and sculptures of the turtles
have been found hundreds of miles
outside their natural range. (Courtesy National Park Service)

SCOTLAND: The repaving
of a University
of Edinburgh
quad has
revealed
labware and
chemical
samples
probably belonging to Joseph Black,
the 18th-century chemist best known for
discovering carbon dioxide. Among the
test tubes and thermometers, as well as
loose samples of mercury and arsenic, were
ceramic jars and crucibles, some still holding
chemical residues, likely made by famed
potter (and Charles Darwin's grandfather)
Josiah Wedgwood.

INDIA: The Mughal
Empire, which
reached its peak
in the late 17th
and early 18th
centuries, left
a remarkable
architectural
legacy, and was also known for its orderly, refined
gardens. At Isa Khan's Tomb in Delhi, archaeologists
have revealed the oldest known Mughal "sunken garden,"
or a garden planted below the level of walkways and
the tomb building. It predates many more well-known
examples and begins to show how Mughal gardens evolved over time. (Courtesy Aga Khan Trust for Culture)

LIBYA: An analysis of
2,000-year-old skulls from
the Garamantian civilization
of the central Sahara
revealed holes that had
begun to heal—indicative
of trephination, a form of
cranial surgery. The earliest
evidence of this practice—
from 13,000 years ago—also
comes from the Sahara, but
it is otherwise rare in North
Africa outside Egypt. The
surgically altered crania
are the first
evidence of
Garamantian
medical
practices.(International Journal of Osteoarchaeology)

CAMEROON: An underground petroleum pipeline
from Chad to the Atlantic port of Kribi is providing a
massive window into 100,000 years of central African
history. Nearly 500 archaeological sites have been
uncovered along the 600-mile project, including the
first substantial evidence of permanent settlement in
the country's tropical forest (dating to 3,000 years
ago). The discoveries have helped push the government
to promise to strengthen its commitment to preserving
cultural heritage.(Courtesy Scott MacEachern, Bowdoin College)

PERU: In the Titicaca basin in the first
millennium B.C., there were two population
centers, Taraco and Pukara. Come the first
century A.D., there was only one. Taraco was
burned to the ground and Pukara began to
expand. Researchers theorize that a war
between the two polities was critical in
the development of Pukara as the region's
first true state, with elites, urbanized settlements, a warrior class, and economic
surpluses. It wouldn't last, though—Pukara itself collapsed around A.D. 400.(Courtesy Charles Stanish, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA)

GREECE: Olympia, home to
the famed Temple of Zeus
and the original Olympic
Games, is commonly thought
to have been destroyed by
an earthquake and covered
by river floods. A new
geoarchaeological study
examined deep deposits of
sand and other material over
the ancient cult site—more,
the researchers say, than
could have been deposited
by local rivers. The sediment
also holds the remains of sea
creatures, such as mollusks
and foraminifera, meaning
that repeated tsunamis may
have been the culprit. (Courtesy Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz)